Why Safety Training for Travelling Employees?

Sales executives, buyers and other employees, are often sent to foreign countries, for business purposes. It is the duty of every organization, to let their employees know about the threats and hazards they could face, while travelling.

A survey conducted by SOS International on 4,700 international business travelers reveals that, 60% travel to high-risk destinations at least once a year, while 16% do so five times a year, or more. According to the U.S Travel Association, U.S. residents recorded 458 million trips for business purposes in 2011.

Employees travelling on business purposes have to confront travel related accidents and travel related dangers, which can be physical, as well as emotional. Travel related dangers include assault, robbery, kidnapping and hostage situations, health issues, conflicts with local culture and laws, for example drinking of alcohol or littering is a serious crime in some countries.

Employees travelling might also run the risk of exposure to contaminated food & water, electrical shocks, fire break outs, endemic diseases, natural calamities, the stress of being alone, concern with hotel security, risks involved in travelling alone, as in private taxis. Women especially, are more prone to sexual assaults, attacks, and various other violent crimes.

According to Association of British Insurers, in 2011 26.2 million travel insurance policies were bought, of which 0.7 million claims were made, resulting in £1.1 million paid to customers each day. An interesting fact is that customers paid an average of £24 for annual travel insurance and £35 for single trip cover while customers claiming travel insurance received on average £594 in 2011. Well, these stats should give you an idea on how costly it is to travel.

There is always a light at the end of the tunnel; all these threats can be reduced, if employees are properly trained and aware of safety measures.There is already a lot of safety training going on to counter these dangers. Let’s see why safety training is important.

Benefits of safety travel training

Boosts Traveler Confidence

Mitigates Risk to Traveler & Employer

Encourages Travel Policy Compliance

Demonstrates a Duty of Care

Identify measures you should take, if you are a victim of nonphysical crime.

Identify ways to avoid physical crime in foreign countries.

Why eLearning for safety travel training

The simple reason is that in whichever country the employee is, he can access the course. They can access the e-Learning course at anytime, anywhere, which is not possible with classroom training. Since safety training is generally boring and does not evoke much interest from learners, eLearning can make safety training interesting with animations, videos, scenarios. Through eLearning, we can bring awareness about measures to take, when an employee is under severe threat.

To give you an idea on how an eLearning on safety travelling looks like, we have designed an eLearning course for one of our reputed clients, touching important aspects of Travel Safety. Every important threat has been clearly covered and presented in an interactive and digestible way. The course can be meted out to any employee, who requires frequent travelling across the globe. The target audience for this program is anyone who travels for business purposes.

Hence, it is the duty of every employer to take care of every employee who is travelling on business purposes.

Being a frequent traveler on business purposes, if you have any experience on how you dealt with uninviting circumstances while on travelling, please share with us.

About CommLab India

CommLab India addresses the learning and development needs of major organizations through its custom and rapid e-learning solutions, translations and mobile learning services. Since 2000, we have been offering technology-enabled solutions to accelerate workforce performance.

Our interactive online courses employ the best training strategies such as microlearning, game-based learning, and videos and are developed using the latest authoring tools. Read More